A study
conducted by cloud networking company Meraki has looked at the amount of data
consumed by various types of devices via Wi-Fi. The study is a comparative
analysis of devices between 2010 and 2011. The results of the study are now
available and show that mobile platforms have gained significantly compared to
desktop platforms.

The
average monthly Wi-Fi data consumed according to Meraki by Android, iPhone, and
iPod users is about 40MB while the average iPad user consumes 200MB of data
each month.

According to the study, iOS devices and Android devices now
account for 58% of all Wi-Fi devices. In 2010, the percentage of the same
devices was 33% showing a significant growth. Desktop platforms declined over
the study period slipping from 63% for Windows and Mac combined to only 36%
this year.

IOS
devices grew significantly over the time period going from 32% of Wi-Fi traffic
up to 47%. Android on the other hand went from 1% to 11%.

The study found that the single most popular Wi-Fi device is the iPhone, which should
surprise no one. The survey gathered its data from the 17,000 deployed cloud
networks Meraki runs around the world. Those 17,000 networks have more than 40
million different users and the study data was gathered using information about
what devices connect to those cloud networks.

It's no
surprise to see the number of computers accessing Wi-Fi declining. Computer
sales are slowing and tablet sales are increasing according to
Gartner's latest data.

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This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

These "studies" are meaningless. Most homes and companies have internal Wi-Fi networks that connect to the outside via some sort of wired connection. External observers (ie, the people running the websites those users visit) have no way to know if a laptop inside one of those networks is connecting via Wi-Fi or via a wired connection, so there's no way they can know what percentage of PCs and Macs connects via Wi-Fi.

Tablets still account for less than 1% of web traffic (and I dare say less than 0.1% of actual work done). This is just some unknown company trying to nudge the market while getting some free publicity for itself.

"The whole principle [of censorship] is wrong. It's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't have steak." -- Robert Heinlein